The Lost World
The Lost World is a 1912 adventure novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describing an expedition led by Professor Challenger to a remote plateau somewhere in , on which dinosaurs, pterosaurs, marine reptiles, and prehistoric mammals still exist. The Lost World is believed to have been influenced by early reports of living dinosaurs collected by Percy Fawcett, and has itself inspired a number of cryptozoologists. Cryptozoological basis , depicted as a living Megalosaurus, by Harry Rountree.]] The basic plot of The Lost World, regarding prehistoric survivors on a South American plateau, is believed to have been inspired by Conan Doyle's meetings with explorer Percy Fawcett, who explored a number of mesas and tepuis in (including the Huanchaca Plateau, where he saw "monstrous tracks of unknown origin"), as well as a still-mysterious tepui named Kurupira, which is said to exist somewhere on the border between and . Doyle is known to have met Fawcett, and took part in a lecture alongside him on 13 February 1911, in which Fawcett spoke about his explorations. Fawcett also wrote that: Fawcett heard stories from the Waiká Indians of the monsters said to inhabit Kurupira, including an aggressive bipedal reptile named the stoa. Conan Doyle included the stoa in The Lost World, where it is depicted as a living Megalosaurus which resembles a frog and hops like a kangaroo, and is at one point explicitly called "stoa" by the novel's Accala Indians.Shuker, Karl P. N. ShukerNature: THE STOA, THE SUWA, AND THE WASHORIWE – A TRIO OF PREHISTORIC SURVIVORS FROM THE REAL 'LOST WORLD'? karlshuker.blogspot.com 17 June 2019 The Kurupira tepui was named after the curupira, a cryptid "man-beast" reported from the Amazon, and although "ape-men" are included in The Lost World, they are not connected with the curupira, which Conan Doyle instead implies is a living dinosaur. Fawcett also famously claimed to have shot a giant anaconda in 1907, and an enormous man-eating "water-snake" does appear briefly in The Lost World. Conan Doyle also consulted Sir Ray Lankester, Director of the British Museum (Natural History), on prehistoric animals which could still exist in South America: Lankester suggested that a modern-day species of Toxodon could exist, and Conan Doyle subsequently included that animal in The Lost World. One of the prehistoric animals existing on The Lost World's plateau is a plesiosaur. In an interesting coincidence, in 1955 explorer Aleksandrs Laime claimed to have seen three 3' long plesiosaur-like animals sunning themselves by an unnamed river on the Auyán Tepui in Venezuela's "lost world". In another coincidence, Conan Doyle also included living pterosaurs in The Lost World: much later in the 20th Century, such a cryptid, the washoriwe, was indeed reported from Kurupira. Influence on cryptozoology The Lost World has served as youthful inspiration for several notable cryptozoologists. Bernard Heuvelmans, the "Father of Cryptozoology", first developed an interest in unknown animals after reading The Lost World and Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Bill Gibbons, who has led several expeditions to the Congo in search of the mokele-mbembe, first became interested in the subject of living dinosaurs after seeing a film adaptation of The Lost World as a child. Notes and references Category:Literary cryptofiction